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Imagining Hillary Rodham Clinton

A new novel wonders what Hillary’s life would have been like if she never married Bill.
hillary clinton

What if Hillary Rodham Clinton had never married Bill? What would her life have been like? What would she have accomplished? In her new novel, Rodham, Curtis Sittenfeld imagines she would have become President (of course) in 2016 and would have spent her evenings drinking tea and working on thorny political problems to save the world. It is pure escapism, Laura Marsh argues in her review of the book over at The New Republic, and one that fails to use Hillary’s own flaws in an interesting way—or in any way at all:

More than any other politician of recent years, Hillary Clinton has served as a way of glimpsing what might have been. Screenwriters have been imagining varieties of Hillary for over a decade—in Veep’s Selina Meyer, CBS’s Madam Secretary, House of Cards’s Claire Underwood—while two much-discussed, unproduced screenplays romanticize her early life and potential. The Hillary Clinton extended universe has something for all ages: For children, there is A Girl Named Hillary, as well as Chelsea Clinton’s She Persisted franchise; for teens, there is Hillary and Chelsea’s co-authored Book of Gutsy Women. There’s her memoir on the ordeal of 2016, What Happened, and the four-part Hulu documentary series on the same events, which radiates disdain not only for Donald Trump but also for Sanders’s challenge from the left. Rarely have roads not taken been so obsessively explored.

This is the terrain on which Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Rodham plays out, the story of an exceptional young woman whose brilliance and verve for leadership are recognized early in life—from her rousing commencement speech at Wellesley, celebrated at the time in LIFE magazine, to her triumphs at Yale Law School—and who wins the prize of the presidency in 2016. As the title suggests, that victory is not the only counterfactual woven into the book. This is an alternate universe, in which Hillary doesn’t marry Bill to become Hillary Rodham Clinton but remains Hillary Rodham, retaining a certain integrity as she’s liberated from this man’s ambitions and catastrophes, and from the many compromises of a life with him. The version of Hillary we get here is a kind of politics nun. ‘In the White House, on a typical weeknight,’ she recalls, ‘I make my nest in the Living Room,’ surrounded by books and papers, sustained by cups of tea and her commitment to public service.

That soothing image makes a stark contrast with the reality of Donald Trump’s evening binges on Fox News. But the way the novel arrives at a Hillary presidency is an unexpectedly tangled one. It is not the story of a woman shorn of a problematic man and finally able to shine. Rather than a fantasy of Hillary’s potential fulfilled, it reimagines major parts of her character, removing from her any of the major flaws or contradictions that could hamper a politician in the MeToo era. Perhaps the strangest aspect of Rodham is that in crafting an exemplary version of Hillary Clinton, the book—apparently unwittingly—presents a harsh critique of the person we know today.

In other news: Ronan Farrow is not a great investigative journalist. He is a man who uses weakly sourced stories (usually involving conspiracies) to build his brand. That’s Ben Smith’s argument in The New York Times.

A fascinating survey of patients in art.

A short history of modern chair design. “Swiss design company and museum Vitra explores the vast history of chair design in its documentary titled Chair Times: A History of Seating – From 1800 to Today. Directed by Heinz Bütler, the film features a team of design experts who use 125 different seating objects to explore the way that seating has changed from the 19th to the 21st century.  Luckily, the documentary is now available for free on its website.”

The University of Notre Dame changes its fall schedule. Classes will begin early, on August 10th. “In addition, the fall break will be cancelled and the semester will end before Thanksgiving.” I like it.

A. M. Juster is no longer the Poetry Editor at First Things. He gave his notice on May 13th.

Revisiting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise: “Fitzgerald had a habit of writing less well on what he called, in his letters, ‘stimulants,’ but his pain over his break-up with socialite Zelda Sayre was not insubstantial. Fitzgerald viewed her rejection as a renunciation of who he was as a person, rather than a mere sign of a bad fit. But the young writer had a plan: to take the 80 or so pages he had of a book called The Romantic Egoist, thread it through with short story sketches, fictionalized autobiography from his Princeton days, and some stream-of-consciousness prose, and turn it into a big hit to win back Zelda’s love. That book, a pasted-together jam-job of seemingly everything Fitzgerald had written to date, would be called This Side of Paradise, and for ten decades it has masqueraded—in literary history, anyway—as a novelistic celebration of the liberal arts life . . . Four days upon the release of this novel by an unknown, unpublished writer, the first printing had sold out, this being a time in our culture when there were readers in America keen to discover something new and exciting. Say what you will about This Side of Paradise, it was both of those things. And it was partially so because despite Fitzgerald’s own desires, the book took a stand against the kind of person and the kind of thinker Fitzgerald almost became.”

Photos: Wisconsin

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